TechStuff

The much hyped GMail2.0, is drawing criticism. Users are complaining of slow performance, their browsers getting crashed. 

More here .

So after Google,IBM and Yahoo Microsoft entered the space of enterprise search. Check this computer world article for more information.

 

Some Important Links

 

Release Candidate of Microsoft 2008 Search Express (This is free!!)

Shedding Light on Data Shadow Systems , this article provides a good insight on how and why data shadow systems are created by business users, inspite of datawarehouse and BI tools that are provided by IT. Personally in my career, I have seen lots of instances where business users create this shadow systems and often these end up as a gaint databases :-) .

Microsoft Corp. has signed an agreement to sell advertisements from outside the U.S. on Facebook Inc., beating rival Google Inc. Microsoft is slowly but making strong strides into advertising market. Good luck guys :-) .

Check out this video of Bill Gates announcing the launch of Office Communication Server 2007. This software aims at integrating voice, email and business meeting technology.

Microsoft has released Windows Live Events. A great way to create a website and send invitations for your events. Start using it.

Windows Live SkyDrive (your hard disk on internet) has been updated with some cool features. The storage space has been doubled to 1 GB!! To know more about other features  click here.

So if you want to find answers to your mathematical caluclations , try Windows Live Search.

 

I just wanted to get the result of this calucation (40%6)*6.7, so typed this in live search. Boom!!! it gave me instant result

Microsoft has acquired a comparitive shopping website/search engine JellyFish. Check out the official announcement here . 

 

This article list the new and unconventional way of presenting the data. Was amazed to see so many new ways :-) . 

Have a look at Tafiti, a very cool application which is powered by Windows Live search and Sliver Light (it is Microsoft's alterantive to Flash). Tafiti helps you to saves your search results, organize them and other things.  Also have a look at this video at Channel 10.

I just managed to download Microsoft Office Outlook Connector and started using it. With this software you can connect to Windows Live (Hotmail) accounts, access your emails and contacts with your Outlook. It really saves your time logging into Windows Live mail, you can just maange every thing from your Outlook. You can download this from here. 

 Check out this new product from Windows Live family, this is called Windows Live SkyDrive. This product is currently in beta and available in US, UK and India. Using SkyDrive you can upload files to one central location, share it with your friends and much more cool things.

 

 

Want to know how to get most out of your Excel 2007, want to know how to use it's new User Interface and other exciting new features. Check this Excel 2007 cheat sheet. 

Microsoft eScrum is a web based end-to-end Project management software for SCRUM. This is based on Team Foundation Server Platform.

Check this site to downlaod it  

If you plan to use Identity column in your table, use it with caution. The value of  identity column might reach it's limit of base data type, this can be serious problem in high availability applications.

 

Check this article by Vyas (SQL Server MVP).

Data Quality is one of the very keys factors for success of a dataware house or a reporting solution. In this demo, Donald Farmer shows how to use Fuzzy logic component for data cleansing and how to use data mining component for data integration. Very practical and crisp video

Social Stream is a new product sponsored by Google, this product allows users to have one Unified Social Network. Social Stream will be one stop application where users can interact with other social networking sites like Flickr,Blogger,Myspace etc. Interesting concept, let's see how user react to this :-)

On Saturday 7/7/2007, MSN is sponsoring Live Earth Musical concert. This concert will be across 7 continents and 24 hours global event to spread awareness about global warming. You can learn more about this event by watching this video

 

Catch your favourite stars and don't forget to check out http://liveearth.msn.com/ on 7/7/2007 :-)

 

 

Google Gears in a new product from Google, which enables offline line functionality to web applications using Javascript API. Check this link for more info on how it works.

Here is list of Free tools which can be used by SQL Server DBAs. It's good collection.

According to recent survey in TDWI(The Datawarehousing Institute), the source systems which have unstructured data like RSS feeds, Wikis, instant messaging, text from voice recognition are on the rise. There is a significant decrease in percentage of legacy and mainframe data sources. The challenge to ETL tools will be to process this unstructured data efficiently.

This white paper explains what a database unit testing is, types of unit test, how to carry out database unit testing using team edition framework.

This article gives a good introduction about Subtypes.  It explains in detail, why the hidden subtypes exist, how are these hidden sub types represented in database desgin through reference data and indicators. I belive, data modellers should represent all the hidden sub types in LDM, this gives a clear picture on the existing business rules and also we don't miss on important meta data on subtypes. Also this article explains on breaking out the logical subtypes with a very good example.

I found this good article on data quality by Robert. Here, he insists on the use of fuzzy match based data quality tools which can help in deduplicaiton of records.